Tuesday, December 2, 2025
Another year has passed, and it’s time to update my app defaults. A lot has happened in the world since Andrew, Martin, and Jason of Hemispheric Views listed their defaults for the first time.
I’ve tried to ditch big‑tech companies and move my data and services to more open platforms, some of them self‑hosted.
Indicated are unchanged entries (🔒) and updated entries (✨). I still use the various categories as written by Andrew:
- 🔒 Mail Client: Mail
- 🔒 Mail Server: posteo.net - still a secondary account on iCloud with custom domain
- 🔒 Notes: Obsidian - Notes.app is empty now
- ✨ To-Do: Pen and Paper - still use Remind Me Faster w/ Reminders.app (NextCloud) to capture things on the go and transfer them to my Bujo later
- 🔒 iPhone Photo Shooting: iOS Camera
- ✨ Photo Management: Photos - looking into ente and Immich (self-hosted) in parallel
- 🔒 Calendar: Calendar - Data moved to NextCloud; using a couple of other apps besides, like Grila or Dato
- ✨ Cloud file storage: Koofr, Filen.io, and NextCloud - this is a mess, have to consolidate; some app data still on iCloud because of lock-in
- ✨ RSS: Classic Reeder and NetNewsWire with FreshRSS (self-hosted) - left Feedbin behind, was using it with Unread in between
- 🔒 Contacts: Contacts - Data moved to NextCloud
- 🔒 Browser: Safari
- ✨ Chat: iMessage, Threema, and Signal - still have WhatsApp installed, but don’t start conversations there and try not to use it at all; access to contacts, pictures, etc. is blocked
- ✨ Bookmarks: Linkding (self-hosted) - switched from Anybox
- 🔒 Read It Later: Readwise Reader - evaluating Readeck (self-hosted)
- 🔒 Word Processing: Pages (MS Word at work) - trying to get familiar with LibreOffice, but it’s so ugly 😢
- 🔒 Spreadsheets: Numbers (MS Excel at work) - cf. above
- 🔒 Presentations: Keynote - cf. above
- 🔒 Shopping Lists: Pons
- 🔒 Meal Planning: Mela
- 🔒 Budgeting & Personal Finance: YNAB - already set-up Actual (self-hosted) but did not switch yet
- 🔒 News: Mastodon, tagesschau.de
- 🔒 Music: Apple Music - started playing around with Navidrome (self-hosted)
- ✨ Podcasts: Overcast - back to Overcast; I’ve used Apple Podcasts and Queue in between
- ✨ Password Management: 1Password - back to 1PW, iCloud Keychain was degraded to “backup”
Update 2025-12-03: removed note to myself
Wednesday, November 26, 2025
PSA: Right now is a good time to buy Indie Software for macOS and iOS. There are lists online with hundreds of discounted apps, e.g. indieappsales.com or github and Lou has a Roundup of his AppAddict Reviews on Sale.
But it’s even easier than this. Just buy all the apps you don’t own yet from the Editor’s Choice bundle. You’re welcome ;-)
Tuesday, November 25, 2025
For a couple of years, I’ve had two Raspberry Pis running on my home network. One was for a Magic Mirror 2 server instance with a few self-written Python scripts. A very cheaply acquired Fire Tablet hangs on the fridge and displays its website in Full Kiosk Mode. The other Raspberry run Pi-Hole and filters ads for the entire home network. To become a little more independent from the big tech bros, in the middle of the year, a VPS from Hetzner joined the setup, running NextCloud. It now provides the entire family with cloud storage, calendar, and address book. The NextCloud software and the VPS are maintained by Hetzner; I only have to worry about the NextCloud configuration. I didn’t dare to do more. Self-hosting, I found and still find - without any (professional) knowledge of networks - quite scary.
That changed a few weeks ago. I still find it scary, but I installed a bit of software anyway. It started, as so often, with a post from Marcus. He mentioned OwnTracks and Geo Activity Playground in his article. I was curious, and since I absolutely didn’t want to open up my home network yet, I rented a regular, very cheap VPS for a few Euros a month from Hetzner and installed OwnTracks there. That was almost too easy. But I didn’t want to install Geo Activity Playground as well on the same server as I didn’t know how to correctly limit access and separate both installations. So finally I started to look into Docker.
Let’s fast forward a bit; I don’t want to bore you too much.
I now have - and it’s all still very much in flux - a dedicated VPS running OwnTracks and another one running Docker. It took a while, but eventually, I understood this YAML syntax for Docker Compose and how to integrate drives, networks, etc. Now, Portainer.io, Watchtower, SWAG, FreshRSS, Linkding, and Dawarich are running on it. I also looked at Actual Budget, ntfy, Wallabag, and KOReader Sync and successfully installed and configured them. Everything runs with its own subdomains, secured with the Hetzner Firewall, backed by regular backups, and snapshots. I learned how to disable shell logins via passwords, generate SSH keys and put them on servers, how to close ports with ufw, and a few other things. Inside the SWAG container, fail2ban is running, and I’ve blocked foreign countries using the DBIP-SWAG-Docker-Mod and also tried to keep bots out. Thanks to FreshRSS, I canceled Feedbin. I’m currently reading my RSS feeds on my Mac and iOS with NetNewsWire (or Reeder Classic), as I don’t like the integration with Unread as much - I can cancel that subscription too. Linkding is so incredibly close to pinboard.in - I immediately felt at home. I love not having to wait for Anybox to finish syncing anymore. Geo Activity Playgrounds is now running peacefully in a Docker container on a new Raspberry Pi 5, with 16 GB Ram and a 256 GB SSD connected via M.2 hat, in my house. Portainer, Watchtower, and additionally Immich, Pi-hole, MagicMirror 2, Calibre-Web, Dashy, and Readeck are also running on it. If I want to access it on the go, I do it via VPN through my Fritz!Box. The two dedicated Pis for the ad blocker and MM2 have been retired and can now be used for other tinkering projects. BTW Calibre-Web is absolutely great, Dashy is fun, and I will switch to Readeck as soon as Readwise reaches Phase 4 of Enshittification. And I’m now looking at Immich in parallel. If I manage to break away from Apple Photos, it will probably be with its help.
tl;dr I’ve learned a lot about self-hosting in the last two weeks, installed and tried out many services, and will now hopefully slow down, see how stable everything runs, and will certainly move one or two services to another server or turn them off again - we’ll see.
What projects are you self-hosting? 😇
Sunday, November 9, 2025
In the latest Hiro report, I read about an app called Roll N' Write for iPadOS. I had never heard about these print and play games and was wondering what they were about. I found the idea compelling, although I’m not a big RPG guy. I’ve downloaded the app, which looks decent, but as I am not a heavy iPad and Apple Pencil user anymore, I was more interested in the paper version. Especially because I recently found joy using pen and paper for some things in my life.
The app’s screenshots featured Dungeon Pages. Right now you can get the core set for free on this Kickstarter page. So, I’ve printed a dice tray, bought some normal dice, and laminated some sheets. I still have to defeat my first boss dungeon - the game is quite hard. I had lots of fun playing it whenever I felt I could waste some time doom scrolling through the socials. I haven’t gone down the rabbit hole of this whole new universe yet, but I think I might try 52 Realms next.
Sunday, October 5, 2025
I am extremely impressed with the LEGO Game Boy set. The build technique is outstanding. There are only two stickers and it looks absolutely brilliant. I am glad I made an exception to my “no new LEGO sets” rule.
Sunday, January 22, 2023
Streak, this is the third time this year I’ve managed to write down what I’ve done during the week.
If you’re interested in what it was like before, you can read about the first and second week.
- I have been very busy at work this week. So there was less to discover. I did a lot of walking with the dog (~ 50 km from Monday to Saturday so far), so at least I had enough time to listen to podcasts:
- For these posts, I was looking for a way to log the podcast episodes I was listening to, but couldn’t find a way to look them up in Overcast. So I wrote a Shortcuts script that logs the currently playing episode to a Drafts document after 30 seconds.
- 🥘 Speaking of the Shortcuts app. I love Mela and in my family we use Pon for shopping lists. Unfortunately, there is no way to export shopping lists directly from Mela to Pon. And it is not possible to import the corresponding Reminders list into Pon. So I put together a little shortcut that somehow does the job.
- ❤️ I was playing around with my omg/now page.
- 💻 I bought Photos Workbench. I think I will mainly use it to compare and select pictures. I really miss a corresponding function in the Photos app. I have looked a lot for alternatives and had even subscribed to Lightroom in the meantime. But that’s a complete overkill and I don’t want to have any more software from that company. That’s why I’m happy that an app has now been released that will hopefully take care of that.
- 🕹️ Played Pick Pack Pup (2022) and the first ten levels of Gravity Express. The former is fine but I did not fell in love so far. The latter ist very similar to Rocket Bytes but Gravity Express has checkpoints, tasks, fuel, etc. I seems not that hardcore as the other. I really like what I’ve seen so far.
- 🗼Stumbled across Lantern.
- Bought Homecoming for Mastodon. I think this can easily be done via Shortcuts too but anyways …
- 📺 No TV, now movies this week 😢
- 🧊Gave the IceCubeApp beta another try. Unlike many others, I’m not warming up to the app. It has too many little bugs that make it hard for me to use it regularly. But of course, the whole App Store approval saga was funny - or rather the opposite.
- 🎙️MacWhisper: It’s absolutely impressive what’s now possible.
- 💬 Too much Mastodon but I really like it there. And Gruber even replied to me. He disagreed and I didn’t want to argue, but whatever!
Sunday, January 15, 2023
After all, this is the second time this year that I’ve managed to write down a bit what has been keeping me busy during the week. 🥳
- 😔 So, this was my first week at work and thus, unfortunately, again far too little time for things I really enjoy. (I’ll have to think about my work situation in great detail at some point).
- 🕹 Playdate: After the two pre-installed games on my playdate, the first two new games included in Episode 1 arrived for me on Monday: Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure and Boogie Loops. Unfortunately, I’m completely musically untalented, so I haven’t looked at Boogie Loops yet, but I despair of Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure. As a now completely inexperienced player, I fail grandiosely at this game. For me it is extremely difficult. I just got to level 20 and I was told that there must be 50 levels. Another game on the list of games I will never play through. Bloom meanders along. I find it a bit of a pity that in the dialogues there are really only the same statements available, each worded a little differently. I don’t feel that you can really influence the story. I’m not 100% sure if I would buy the game again. I had a quick look at EYELAND. However, it doesn’t support savegames and so far I haven’t felt like trying to tackle it in one go.
- 🎧 Podcasts: Despite the ones I regularly listen to (ATP, The Talk Show, Automators, Connected, Techmeme Ride Home) and due to my recent interest in micro.blog and omg.lol, I stumbled upon Hemispheric Views by Andrew Canion, Jason Burk, and Martin Feld as well as Core Intuition by Manton Reece and Daniel Jalkut.
- 📔 I’ve written a follow up post to my short list of non-work related macOS apps I really like: Even more macOS apps I enjoy using 😎
- 🍿 I’ve watched Avatar: The Way of Water in the cinema with my family. Bombastic, sure, but - as expected - completely irrelevant and above all predictable plot. Still, I didn’t regret going to the cinema again.
- 📺 Together with my wife I finished watching the third season of For All Mankind. I think I liked it better than the second and I’m looking forward to the fourth.
- 🤓 Because of omg.lol , I tried to understand IRC. It’s been a long time since I was on it. It felt like back in the Amiga days. I’ve installed irssi via Homebrew, was able to connect, but failed with its operation. I’ll have to look at it again some other time. Even though I am not a fan of, I understand very well why Discord etc. have become famous 🤦♂️
- 🍩 I’ve 3Dprinted some small things, primarily for household or work purposes, such as an iPad Stand, to use it as a second monitor at work and a tea bag drainer. And of course things for my AnkerMake M5 itself, like Spare Parts Box and Accessory Bins. (I was already afraid that this is another hobby that is only concerned with itself. In other words, you do things with it that you only do because you now have this thing that does things … You understand me.)
- 🤯 For me, I still haven’t been able to conclusively determine on which platform I want to follow whom and where I want to post something and how. The interoperability of the fedivers (micro.blog <-> mastodon together with RSS etc.) is ingenious, but it also leads to a lot of friction and redundancy at least for me. I definitely need to get better at this. In all the experimenting I’ve been doing over the last few days, I’ve often had the problem of finding the exact URL of an RSS feed. To achive this via Reeder or similar was too cumbersome for me and the times when the browser I use simply displayed the feeds prominently are also long gone. I have therefore created an iOS/macOS shortcuts. I’m not good at it, but it does the job I hope.
- 👨💻 Oh, I almost forgot. The battery on my private Intel MacBook Pro was dead. I had it replaced. It cost me € 229 - not exactly cheap. But the whole thing, including sending it in (to the Czech Republic, repair and return) took less than three days 👏. However, I got a new top case with a new keyboard etc., which probably wasn’t a bad idea for that model. Since it had already been in use for several years, I decided to completely rebuild it. I would have preferred to save myself the experience. So many little macOS (iCloud) bugs in the process really annoyed me and the new system settings are hell.
🙋♂️
Sunday, January 8, 2023
I was motivated by muhh’s blog entry to write down what was on my mind in the first week of January. I’m not sure yet if this will become something more regular, but I wanted to start putting something online more often anyway - more on that below.
I’ve had the last two weeks off. The weather was bad, I had a cold 🤧 and therefore a lot of cycling wasn’t an option either (at least that’s what I told myself). So, I used the time to hang out at the computer a little more than usally. There was a lot of exciting things to discover there.
Somehow Elon started this with the downfall of twitter, which he initiated. I had only been there reading for years anyway, and then after the takeover I decided to download my data, delete the clients on my end devices and no longer use the account.
As an alternative, I was of course interested in Mastodon and clicked an account on the standard instance mastodon.social. Thanks to tools like movetodon and fedifinder my timeline has also filled up pretty quickly, and I actually “met” pretty quickly some real people with whom you could exchange ideas in a friendly manner. All in all a very positive experience.
One great thing about the fediverse is the extreme dynamics of the tools and clients that are currently being built around it. It feels like back in the early days of Twitter where, for example, a single programmer, Loren Brichter, with Tweetie could turn the whole twitter landscape upside down. (BTW he only has an inactive account on Mastodon 😢)
I tried countless clients over a few days. Among others (unsorted)
The official app is okay, but IMHO not great; toot! I liked the range of functions very much, but you also have to cope with the strange design somehow. Because I follow some accounts that post a lot, and since the timeline on Mastodon is not orchestrated by any algorithms, posts from other people are in danger of being lost. Thats why a good list function is very important to me personally. There, Mammoth also makes a very good impression, but in the end I was lucky and was able to test Ivory via Testflight. The app by Paul Haddad and Mark Jardine has an button design that is a bit too playful for my taste, but otherwise it is extremely stable and really great at everything it does. The recently added list features are awesome, as they allow certain accounts to be hidden from the home view. So, atm I stick to Ivory and am looking forward to even better builds.
Then, sometime last week, I came across a post from @otaviocc@social.lol on omg.lol. And then, coincidentally, I signed up for the service with thousands of other people (who must have read a post on Hacker News and not otaviocc’s post 😎).
On omg.lol you ultimately get a “funny” address on the web that contains a wide variety of small services. A single page website (to use as a business card), a statuslog, an omg.lol-email address (forwarder), different DNS services, pastebin, PURL service, a weblog (beta), etc. And while I was at it anyways, I also have my Mastodon account moved from mastodon.social to social.lol. Luckily that went really smoothly. It was a lot of fun getting involved, configuring everything and thinking about what it’s even good for 🤦♂️.
In the meantime, I continued to work with the AnkerMake M5, which also arrived after a very long wait at the beginning of December. All in all I’m very happy with the 3D printer, but still don’t really know what got into me back in early 2022 when I backed it on Kickstarter. But that is definitely going too far at this point and maybe I’ll go into more detail elsewhere.
Well, micro.blog is kind of a universe in itself too. In addition to choosing a theme, there is of course the client question. I got some for iOS (the official app, Gluon for Micro.blog and MacOS (MarsEdit 5, which I use via Setapp) looked at various editors (iA Writer, Drafts and Runestone. In addition, there are useful tools as Mimi Uploader (iOS) to upload images and Epilogue for Micro.blog to track books, but I’m just starting out here, there are just too many apps and I have to see which ones “click” for me.
There are of course all sorts of little helpers for publishing interesting links and posts on Mastodon or blog entries. Among others Linky and Re: Toot by Simon B. Støvring (who, by the way, is also responsible for Runestone) I would like to mention at this point.
As if all that wasn’t enough, at the beginning of last week, after a 1.5 year wait, I received my long-awaited playdate game console. (In the meantime I had actually already forgotten that I had even ordered it and I was all the happier that it suddenly arrived.) It’s a lot of fun to deal with the little yellow box and I wanted to jot down some impressions I got. I rented a domain with Wordpress installed last year already and tried a few things with micro.blog but didn’t really publish anything on either platform. This year I wanted to change that and thus started with a post about the playdate.
All in all, it was an exciting time in terms of IT. Now all of a sudden I somehow have three blogs and will soon have to concentrate on one of them and see when everyday work starts again tomorrow, whether I still have the time and, above all, the desire to continue writing down my thoughts, or these escapades were again one of my “manic” excursions into something new and I would lose interest again the day after tomorrow - which would be a pity.
So, maybe cu next week 🙋♂️
PS: initally, I wanted to talk a little bit about the music and podcasts I’ve listened to, too but this post is already way too long.
